This painting depicts what in some respects mimics an anatomy amphitheater, but the title, "Arena," tells us that what is going on here is more spectacle than instruction. Painted in 1992, early in the AIDS epidemic, when rapid decline and death from the disease was almost unavoidable, this complex artwork catalogs some of what was taking place in society at the time. A shaft of window light illuminates the center where a masked doctor is examining a Caucasian patient while a nurse, similarly masked, stands nearby. A large white plume of smoke or steam is emanating from the patient's head. The examination is being filmed and narrated.

In the lower right-hand corner a dark skinned patient attached to an IV is lying on a gurney. An attendant has his back toward the patient, whom he seems to be ignoring as he speaks with another white clad hospital worker. If one follows a diagonal from the ignored patient through to the central figures, toward the upper left, another patient, covered completely by a sheet and apparently dead, is being wheeled out of the arena. Adjacent to this scene are people seated cross-legged on the floor, listening to a speaker reading from a book while a Buddha floats above him. [According to art critic Klaus Kertess, the reader is poet John Giorno, "who instructed Moore in Buddhist practice" (Toxic Beauty, p. 11)]. In the lower left, a vendor wheels his cart, selling soda and sausages, adding to the carnival atmosphere. Just ahead of him an elderly woman holds a flattened out body in her arms.

To the upper right, police barricades and struggling policeman attempt to hold back a group of protesters carrying a sign saying "Who's in Charge?". In the upper center, two skeletons stand in front of a screen and hold banners bearing Latin inscriptions. An instructor is pointing to drawings on the screen - molecules and cell membranes. Other skeletons are positioned at the edges of the painting, also bearing banners, and in the lower center two skeletons stand in front of a fruit tree. One of these skeletons holds what seems to be a heart dripping blood. Several figures dressed in costume are posing or dancing. The curved rows of the arena are sparsely populated and include skeletons of various animals as well as two men who are injecting themselves in the arm. Robotic figures appear here and there in the painting.

Isserley is an alien whose assignment on earth is to abduct male (preferably muscular and burly) hitchikers for their processing, in a subterranean area under a barn in Scotland where she and her fellow aliens are based, as farmed animals that are castrated, made mute by tongue-amputation and fattened up in pens like calves for their veal. After a few months, they are eventually slaughtered and butchered for meat and then transported back to Isserley's native land, which is portrayed as a dark, arid, unpleasant place where meat is a rare and expensive delicacy.

Vaguely canine in her original form, Isserley has had to undergo mutilating surgery to pass as a human whose day job is to drive on the A9 of Scotland picking up unsuspecting men and then, after sometimes quite interesting conversations, paralyzing them by flicking a switch that activates twin jets that come up through the front passenger seat injecting an immediately acting curare-like drug. Isserley then transports them back to the farm.

In constant physical pain from the surgery and the unnatural upright posture, and always questioning herself, her role on earth, her feminity amongst the otherwise all male alien workforce, Isserley falls in love with the earth's natural world (there are not oceans or lakes on her world), especially Scotland's lochs, rain, cloud and snow. Sheep hold a special place in her heart.

Amlis Vess, the son of the owner of the company that is selling earthmeat at exorbitant prices back home, shows up for an unnannounced site visit and curiosity since he is ideologically opposed to this killing of animals - he has no idea how sentient and intelligent earthlings are and this fact is carefully kept secret from him during his brief visit, which is also marked by his marvelling at earth's natural beauties and what appears to be an emotional or sexual attraction to Isserley.

After some rough handling by one of the hitchhikers who attempts to rape her, her troubling interactions with Amlis Vess, news that the police have taken notice of a missing hitchhiker and are conducting an investigation, and her discovery that there may be a replacement for her in the offing - Isserley decides to strike out on her own. The end of the novel is, although not shocking, not expected.

In 1701, the wax sculptor Gaetano Zumbo is invited to the Court of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo III de Medici. His talent in is portraying the human form in various states of decay – anatomically correct, each figure set in a box recreating scenarios, as chilling memento mori.

Zumbo is well received in Florence and befriends anatomists and physicians at the local hospital Santa Maria Nuova. But he cannot fathom why he has been invited until he meets the Grand Duke himself. Cosimo confesses the misery of his marriage to the much younger Frenchwoman, Marguerite Louise. She has left him, yet he loves her still. He asks Zumbo to fashion a wax woman for him—but the artist must be careful because Florence—under Cosimo’s own pious orders – is becoming increasingly intolerant of sexual deviation of any sort. Spies are everywhere.

Zumbo is given the corpse of a young woman, mysteriously drowned, and makes a cast of her body. Then he finds a way to make the dubious project “acceptable” by concealing a fetus inside her removable but flat belly.

Meanwhile, Zumbo spies a beautiful woman in an apothecary shop – and spends a long time searching for her. Her name is Faustina, and eventually they begin an affair, which is deemed unacceptable. They must flee from a murderous Dominican priest who plans to torture and kill them both.

Alison Lapper is a friend of the sculptor, and a painter herself, who was born with phocomelia (defined in Stedman’s Medical Dictionary as a defective development of arms, legs or both, so that the hands and feet are attached close to the body, resembling the flippers of a seal). As suggested by the title, the 11 foot, 6 inch sculpture in Carrera Marble shows Lapper naked and pregnant, her severely shortened limbs apparent to all.

Her body, with her heavily pregnant belly, is exposed and elevated in milky marble, subject to the stares of passersby, as well as the elements and pigeons. Its formidable mass, the creamy marble, and the dignified composition support the contention that it celebrates a woman’s pregnancy, her health and her sexuality in the context of a society and a tradition that would rarely assign these values to someone so obviously "disabled".

F. González-Crussi, professor emeritus of Pathology at the Feinberg School of Medicine at Northwestern University, has written several books on medicine and the human body. Carrying the Heart deals with five basic organ systems; he styles them as Digestive, Scatology, Respiratory, Reproductive, and Cardiovascular.

In his Foreword, he rejects a mechanical view of the body and medicine that treats patients as passive protoplasm. He seeks to engage the imagination of his readers so that they can become active participants in health care.

For each system, González-Crussi assembles an eclectic wealth of materials: views of authors from classical times onwards, scientists who changed perceptions of the body, his own hands-on view as a pathologist, parallel organs in other mammals, and, usually, an extended narrative of a person with an unusual anatomical history. These are highly personal essays, “rhapsodies,” we might say, which stitch together unusual and interesting facts, observations, and interpretations. It’s impossible to guess what will be on the next page, and the discoveries are many. A gifted stylist, González-Crussi writes with both erudition and wit.

For “Digestive,” he cites Livy, Paracelsus, Joan Baptista van Helmont, and others before turning to Thomas Bartholin, who questioned the notion that the stomach was somehow the “king” of the body and the seat of the soul. González-Crussi writes, “the gastric cardia admits and stores impure food, without this having any discernible effect on the soul. Nor is the soul damaged by performers at circuses and country fairs who lower swords and knives into the stomach” (p.7). The text marches on through Réamur, Spallanzani and others, before turning to the well-known story of Dr. William Beaumont and his patient Alexis St. Martin, who had a hole in his side (from a gunshot). Beaumont experimented with materials placed directly into the stomach.

Next in the digestive process are the bowels, discussed on “Scatology,” literally the study of scat or excrement. González-Crussi is fascinated by cultural values of “death, putrescence, and dissolution” that attach to our scat. He draws on Rabelais, Luther, the Gnostics, Chuang-tzu, and the Aztecs for the views on the contents and process of the bowels—more than the nature of the actual bowels themselves. The next 30 pages deal with enemas, including the modern (and discredited) notion of “auto-intoxication” a justification bruited about even today for colonics.

Oddly enough, the enema theme continues in the “Respiratory” essay, because there were “smoke enemas” for some 200 years. Page 104 shows a French illustration of interlocked tubes for this purpose; indeed the same illustration graces the slipcover for the book. González-Crussi draws on Anaximenes, Pirandello, Plutarch, Hawthorne, and others. Some 15 pages describe a famous tuberculosis patient, Frederic Chopin, although perhaps he was actually a cardiac patient.

Part I of “Reproductive” is “Female.” We quickly learn that “The uterus is placed between the bladder and the rectum. As a piece of real estate, the uterus would be much devalued by the condition of the neighborhood” (p. 152). Nonetheless, the uterus is “immunologically privileged,” fending off germs that might infect a fetus (which in itself is “half foreign” because of the father’s genes). Drawing on many commentators, González-Crussi discusses menstruation, and pregnancy, although not genital pleasure or orgasm. Some insightful pages explore the normal death of cells within our body.

Part II, “Male” discusses erections, side-curving penises, and the famous penises of Napoleon, Rasputin, and Jesus.

The last essay, “Cardiology” briefly explores two types of knowing (from the heart, from the brain) before a lengthy retelling of the Lay of Ignauer; this strange story ends with women whom he has seduced eating his cooked heart. The last section discusses Harvey’s discovery of the heart as a pump. The final two pages see a new consideration of the heart as a second brain.

One of two sons of a broken U.S.-Dutch family, Kiddo chooses to live off the Dutch welfare system spending his state alms on drugs. Although he realizes it is but the bleakest of efforts not to come to grips with a difficult relationship with his older brother, Morton, Kiddo perseveres, forming an uneasy alliance with Pietje, a woman who also knows Morton.

The novel is told by Kiddo with contributions to the multi-faceted story in the form of letters from Morton, who gives up a brilliant future as a genius in physics to travel around the world, and diary entries by Pietje, who has some unpleasant truths to tell about Kiddo's world. Morton, known as Mort, writes Kiddo that he has cancer and not long to live, returning home to die. Honoring the dying request of his brother, Kiddo attends Mort's autopsy (yes, the play on Morte/Mort proves irresistible to Morley, or is it Mor(te)ley), a fairly gruesome scene. This proves not to be the death of Mort/Morte/Death for Kiddo and he requires help from Pietje and more introspection before Kiddo can lay his brother's bones to rest.

This poem is divided into two formally identical halves of eleven lines each. The first part describes a visit to a "dissecting room," a Gross Anatomy laboratory. The female visitor dispassionately observes the four male cadavers, "already half unstrung" by dissection, and the students, "white-smocked boys," who work on them. She observes the fetuses in bottles, "snail-nosed babies," which are given a kind of power and fascination absent from the cadavers. Finally, "he," one of the students, hands her the "cut-out heart" of his cadaver.

This disturbing valentine is indirectly elaborated on in the second half of the poem, which describes Brueghel’s painting The Triumph of Death (1562), a "panorama of smoke and slaughter." The speaker focuses on a pair of lovers who, in the lower right corner of the painting, seem entirely unaware of the horrors around them. Enclosed by their love, they form a "little country," admittedly "foolish" and "delicate," but spared from encroaching death--if not by love itself, then at least by the arresting effect of art’s image, for desolation is "stalled in paint."

This poem builds by repetition to a climax: "if there is a river /more beautiful than this," if there is a river more faithful, braver, more ancient, more powerful. Each repetition begins a new stanza, a stronger stanza, ending finally in a prayer that, if there is such a river, it should flow "through animals / beautiful and faithful and ancient / and female and brave." (24 lines)

Open Wound is a novel crafted from the extensive documents of an unsettling, little-known, yet remarkable episode in the history of medicine.

In the summer of 1822, Dr. William Beaumont was practicing medicine at a rugged military outpost on Mackinac Island in Lake Huron, part of the Michigan territory. His assignment as Assistant Surgeon, US Army represented about the best circumstances he could expect from his training as a medical apprentice without a university education. In addition to soldiers and officers, Beaumont sometimes attended patients from the American Fur Company, whose warehouses shared the island's harbor. On June 6, an accidentally discharged gunshot cratered the abdomen of an indentured, French-speaking Canadian trapper. Fortunately for him, Beaumont served during the War of 1812 and knew how to care for devastating wounds. With the surgeon's medical attention and willingness to house and feed the hapless trapper, Alexis St. Martin's body unexpectedly survived the assault. But his wound didn't fully heal. As a result, it left an opening in his flesh and ribs that allowed access to his damaged stomach. Through the fistula, Beaumont dangled bits of food, collected "gastric liquor," and made unprecedented observations about the process of digestion.

His clever and meticulously documented experiments, conducted on the captive St. Martin over several years, corrected prevailing assumptions about digestion. Once thought to depend on grinding and putrification, normal digestion, Beaumont observed, was a healthy chemical process. Any signs of putrification or fermentation indicated pathology. In 1833 Beaumont published his thesis on the chemistry of digestion in Experiments and Observations of the Gastric Juice and the Physiology of Digestion. Shortly before completing the book, he received a temporary leave from his military service to restart his research in Washington. But to carry on his project, Beaumont had to persuade St. Martin-who entered and exited his physician-researcher's life several times before-to leave his growing family in Canada and once again become a research subject. St. Martin does return, with pay, and briefly accepts his role. But he also confronts Beaumont about whether the long confinement on Mackinac Island was more necessary for the patient's survival or the doctor's research agenda. Or for the doctor's subsequently improved station in life.

Although some of Beaumont's academically trained colleagues found fault with his methodologies, the farmer's son and frontier doctor did achieve a gratifying level of professional accomplishment and wealth. To enjoy them, he had to set aside humiliations he experienced along the way, accept his lot after military service as an ordinary practitioner in St. Louis, and weather an unforeseen turn near the end of life.

A female figure stands facing us, unclothed, her left side darker than her right, occupying the middle of the frame. She is surrounded with images from the process of human reproduction. The largest of the former is the well-formed male fetus in the frame’s lower left, which is connected by a thin umbilical cord wrapped around the figure’s right leg to a fetus in an early stage of development in the figure’s abdomen, which we see as if by x-ray.

Tear-shaped droplets of blood drip down the figure’s left leg and soak into a dark mass in the earth, where they nourish the roots of several plants. A tear rolls down each of the figure’s cheeks. Just above her to her left is a weeping crescent moon. Below it is an artist’s palette that the figure holds up with a second left arm.